This delightful and surprising book provides a window into the founding of Sabah through the eyes of a rather curious lady, Ada Blanche Pryer, who arrived in January 1884 as the wife of the first Resident of Sandakan. Ada is already well known by scholars of SE Asia for two earlier publications, the book A Decade in Borneo and her diaries, Mrs Pryer in Sabah, each of which extolled and tackled colonization through a different perspective from what we know from her contemporary white male adventurers.

However, Ada also wrote numerous vivid articles and short stories some of which were published in the newspapers of the day but others, the short stories, in particular, have never before been published. These writings were rooted in Ada’s passionate appreciation of the cultural complexities of Sabah’s east coast at the time of colonization, complexities that are now of more interest than ever to Sabah’s people themselves.

Accompanied by maps, contemporary watercolours and the author’s own prints, this book consolidates these hitherto unknown writings together and provides the biographical context in which they were written. These articles and stories delicately reveal the colonial lifestyle in the town of Sandakan, the eccentricities of the members of her household, observations of native customs from travels into the interior, and life on a Bornean estate where her husband was pioneering plantation crops. She weaved her observations of native customs into her short stories about man/women relationships in the setting of Sandakan Bay where the beautiful raven-haired women although shy and ostensibly demure were able to make their own choices in life just as she did.